The Financial Intelligence and Analysis Unit issued more than €3.3 million in administrative fines and penalties last year through 33 cases of enforcement action for non-compliance with anti-money laundering requirements.
According to the report, which was tabled in Parliament by Finance Minister Clyde Caruana on Wednesday, the unit once again saw an increase in suspicious transaction reports of 19% over 2021.
In real terms, the unit received 8,740 reports in 2022 - 1,417 reports more than 2021.
FIAU acting director Alfred Zammit explained how the top reporting sector remains the remote gaming sector with more than 5,000 of these reports coming from remote gaming companies.
Almost 1,000 reports came from virtual asset operators, who manage cryptocurrencies, and another 1,000 from credit institutions.
FIAU-generated reports grew from a meagre 35 in 2019 to 154 last year.
Investigations by the FIAU did not manage to confirm the underlying criminal offence of money laundering in 65% of the cases, despite strong red flags. But fraud and tax evasion continued to be the most common offence.
Zammit said that following various training initiatives and support to subject persons - the persons who are legally responsible for companies -, the unit noted an increase in reporting across most sectors.
The response rates to the annual risk evaluation questionnaire – an important source of information for the FIAU’s risk-based approach to supervision – continued to improve, reaching an average of 98% across the financial and non-financial sectors.
He said the FIAU continued to foster collaborative partnerships with local and international stakeholders, making almost 8,000 contacts and information exchanges with foreign counterparts. Locally, it shared intelligence with the police in 343 cases and with the commissioner for revenue in just over 400 cases.
Zammit said the unit carried out 138 inspections last year, with more than a quarter of them closed immediately and another half slapped with a warning with a list of items they needed to address.
Concurrently, the unit organised many information sessions and outreach programmes, including one which is targeting schoolchildren.
Staff from across the unit took part in 70 training initiatives by participating in panels, giving presentations and knowledge sharing. Of these, 16 were FIAU-led initiatives.
“The message is that we are not out to get you but we want to increase the drive towards more compliance and we are seeing results,” Zammit said.
FIAU’s chairman Kenneth Farrugia said in his report that 2022 was a challenging year for the unit which worked hard to address grey areas identified by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, to get the country off its grey list within a year from when it was placed on the list.
He said the changes brought about by the FIAU in several areas of its operations, the revised methodologies, processes and procedures, and the actions taken to ensure the effective application of anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) standards were acknowledged and commended not only by the FATF and Moneyval but also by the European Commission, the European Banking Authority, and the International Monetary Fund, amongst others.
“Today the FIAU is highly regarded by European institutions and amongst the global financial intelligence community,” Farrugia said.
